The Haunting of Verdant Valley

The Haunting of Verdant Valley is a photo book about Silicon Valley—a place of immense power, yet eerily ordinary. These images reveal the hidden layers of a landscape that shapes the modern world.

For four years in college, I wrote code, I dreamed in C++, tracing a path that seemed destined to lead me someplace like this. But I didn’t end up in Silicon Valley, at least not as a software developer. Instead, I’ve spent days photographing these campuses, in startups, in quiet neighborhoods and at sites marked by a small plaque denoted something that happened here that actually changed our whole world. I read historical accounts, including the stories of the Native tribes forced from this land. And it’s not an abstraction when the man who ordered their eradication went on to found a university that transformed this verdant valley—once home to thousands of acres of fruit orchards—into buildings where men would lay the foundations of our modern world.

I made these photographs before a line of tech CEOs stood, shoulder to shoulder, in the U.S. Capitol as President Trump took his oath of office—a moment that seemed to mark a turning point for Silicon Valley. The idealism that once fueled its pioneers had long since been eclipsed by something bigger, more pragmatic and purely capitalistic. The Haunting of Verdant Valley explores this evolution, capturing the tension between what Silicon Valley aspired to be and what it has become.